The Knight News Challenge applications are in and I find them a particularly exciting batch this year, perhaps because of a burst of activity spurred on by a handful of surveillance revelations you might have heard about. I read through all 660: below are my list of promising applications from friends and colleagues. I’m sure there are many more awesome ones, including some I already “applauded”, but I thought a starter list would still be useful. Go applaud these and add comments to help them improve.

Encrypt all the things

Making secure email (using the OpenPGP standard) easier by developing an awesome native email client where encryption is built-in. They already have an alpha running that you might have seen on Kickstarter.

Peter Eckersley, just over the Bay at EFF, wants to develop criteria for an annual prize for usable encryption software. (Noticing a theme to these encryption projects yet?) Notes SOUPS (CMU’s conference on usable security, happening this summer at Facebook) as a venue for discussion.

LEAP (leap.se) is a project for developing a set of encryption tools, including proxies, email (with automatic key discovery) and chat, in an effort to make encryption the default for a set of at-risk users. (My colleague Harry Halpin at W3C works with them, and it all sounds very powerful.)

TextSecure is likely the most promising protocol and software project for easy-to-use widely adopted asynchronous encrypted messaging. (Android users should be using the new TextSecure already, fyi; it basically replaces your SMS app but allows for easy encryption.) Moxie (formerly of Twitter) is pretty awesome and it’s an impressive team.

Standards

Speaking of encryption, there are two proposals for standards work directly related to encryption and security.

This one may sound a little deep in the weeds, but DANE is a standard which promises end-to-end transport security on the Internet via DNSSEC, without relying on the brittle Certificate Authority system. Yay IETF!

My colleagues at W3C are working on WebCrypto — a set of APIs for crypto to be implemented in the browser so that all your favorite Web applications can start implementing encryption without all making the same mistakes. Also, and this is of particular interest to me, while we’ve started to do privacy reviews of W3C specs in general via the Privacy Interest Group, this proposal suggests dedicated staff to provide privacy/security expertise to all those standards groups out there from the very beginning of their work.

Hypothes.is (with lots of I School connections!) has been contributing to standards for Web annotations, so that we can all share the highlights and underlines and comments we make on web pages; they’re proposing to hire a developer to work with W3C on those standards.

A large handful of us I School alumni have been working in some way or another on the idea of privacy icons or standardized privacy notices. Mary Hodder proposes funding that project, to work on these notices and a “consent receipt” so you’ll know what terms you’ve accepted once you do.

Documenting practices, good and bad

Joe Hall, CDT chief technologist and I School alumnus extraordinaire, has an awesome proposal for writing guides for usable security. Because it doesn’t matter how good the technology is if you don’t learn how to use it.

IndieWeb and Self-Hosting

I’ve been following and participating in this #indieweb thing for a while now. While occasionally quixotic, I think the trend of building working interoperable tools that rely as little as possible on large centralized services is one worth applauding. This proposal from @caseorganic suggests “fellowships” to fund the indie people building these tools.

Even if you had your own domain name, would you still forward all your email through GMail or Hotmail or some free webmail service with practices you might not understand or appreciate? This project is for “a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP server: a mail server in a box.”

Eric Mill (@konlone) has been working on a related project, to make it end-user easy to install self-hosted tools (like Mail-in-a-box, or personal blog software, or IFTTT) on a machine you control, so that it’s not reserved for those of us who naturally take to system administration. (Also, Eric is super cool.)